Paradoxes of Predation in Francophone Africa

Abstract

Francophone sub-Saharan Africa today consists of 17 countries in which French is the main language of politics and government. While the French colonial empire no longer exists as a formal structure, the legacy of its former empire continues to influence French African policy. Through its cultural imperialism the common imprint of France upon this immense region is expressed in the French language, as well as its accompanying traditions of law, administration, and education. Through an ingenious system of bilateral cooperation accords, France has installed privileged relations with its former African colonies in culture, education, natural resources, aid, trade, finance, security, defense, and a common currency. Through continuous military interventions, France has perpetuated its strategic armed dominance. France is the only member of the UN Security Council to have an explicitly “African policy.” But the economic importance of Africa to France’s foreign policy must be understood as less about its macroeconomic importance to France as a whole than about its profitability to a small predatory lobby of influential French actors who conduct scandalous “African affairs.”

Keywords:

• Francophone Africa
• colonialism
• postcolonialism
• development

JEL codes:

• F54
• N37
• N47
• O55

Notes

1 The French language is what binds the French together. In the past, France was divided into regions that spoke different languages: Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Corsican, Flemish, Savoyard, and Occitan. Almost every area had its own patois, a threat to national unity. So during the Third Republic schoolchildren were punished for speaking their regional dialects, and an official organism—l’Academie française—was created to ensure the purity of the French language.

2 Houphouët-Boigny was afraid that his rich colony would have its wealth dispersed like a tea bag into the boiling water of the large and much poorer West African Federation (AOF).

3 Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. (Other French colonies—Djibouti, Madagascar, and Comoros—were not connected to this territorial mass and were administered separately, as was Reunion.)

4 Seeking to escape the seemingly eternal return of these Gaullist institutions of French African policy making, President Macron has tried to innovate by nominating classmates from his alma mater Ecole Nationale d’Administration to a newly created Presidential Council for Africa (Conseil présidentiel pour l’Afrique, CPA) directly attached to the Elysée, whose mission is to nourish his African policy with proposals and prepare his official visits as head of state to the African continent. But Macron’s new monsieur Afrique Franck Paris participated in the selection of these personalities, and their government inexperience as football players, insurance lawyers, and scientists leaves them largely without political clout in the machinery of state.

5 The fathers of the CFA Franc and the Euro like François Perroux or Jacques Rueff shared a technocratic vision of social control through monetary policy.

6 These “Dossiers Noirs” come out of an initial collaboration between the anticorruption NGO Survie and Oxfam France-Agir, which lead campaigns that attempt to push French African policy toward democracy. Twenty-two dossiers have exposed corrupt mechanisms and denounce scandalous drifting from the proper course by government officials and clandestine networks. (See www.survie.org)

7 Oil-dependent countries suffer from enclave industrialization, limited economic diversification, and vulnerability to price shocks, decay in their manufacturing and agricultural sectors, declining terms of trade, misguided economic policies, and a fundamental neglect of human capital. Economically these states have tended to neglect their human development because they are blinded by their resource wealth, which transforms them into oil-rentier economies.

8 “At the beginning of 1994 I coined the term ‘Françafrique’ to describe the tip of the iceberg that is Franco-African relations, and went on to develop this concept in approximately twenty books and special reports. Here, briefly, I shall explain what the term refers to: the secret criminality in the upper echelons of French politics and economy, where a kind of underground Republic is hidden from view” (Verschaeve 2006).